Subagents and parallel work

Give each worker a bounded task

The native agent can delegate independent work to child agents. A good task names the objective, files in scope, constraints, and the evidence expected back.

Ask a research worker to locate the authentication flow while you review the tests. Do not let either task edit files yet.

Child agents do not automatically receive the entire parent conversation. Their instructions need enough context to stand on their own.

Work and research profiles

Work children inherit enabled tools, with the applicable approvals. Research children are read-only. Plan mode forces delegated work into research; Debug also uses research delegation. Multitask mode separates coordination from mutation by workers.

The shipped background-delegation implementation allows three running children per parent, eight per window, and nesting depth two. Additional work can queue. These are concurrency bounds, not a promise that a provider will have capacity.

Watch and verify

Background launches return before the work is complete. Status is available in the Agents panel, and results return as notifications. Do not interpret a launch receipt as a finished task.

Avoid overlapping file ownership. Parallel workers are not automatically isolated Git worktrees. Review the combined diff, reconcile conflicting findings, and run integration checks before accepting the result.

External ACP agents may have different delegation features and limits. These instructions describe the native V3Code agent.